Hitler Youth: Fortunate to be Americans!

My paternal grandfather was originally from Iowa where he had attended high school with William L. Shirer. Although they had been friends, they didn’t keep up with each other afterwards, though my grandfather had followed the career of his later illustrious schoolmate. In the mid-sixties, my grandfather had read that Mr. Shirer was in our city (I think lecturing).

My grandfather went down to the hotel where Mr. Shirer was staying hoping to reunite with him. My grandfather was very pleased that his old friend did remember him well and even more so when Mr. Shirer graciously accepted his invitation to dinner at our house. (We had been staying with my grandparents at the time.) This was the one and only time I ever met the man, but I remember the occasion vividly to this day. He was obviously a very interesting person.

In the course of relating myriad anecdotes concerning his reporting experiences before and during the war, one incident he recounted made a great impression upon me, probably because I had then been age twelve, the same age as the boy in his story. Therefore, it frightened me.

Mr. Shirer related that one day in (I think) 1939 (before the war had begun) he had been in a park in Berlin which he had frequented in those days. A group of kids in the Deutsches Jungvolk (German Young People, the junior branch of the Hitler Youth) strolled by. One of them seemed to straggle and broke off from the rest to approach Mr. Shirer. The boy (age 12) asked him if it was true that he was an American reporter; his father had apparently pointed him out to the boy on a previous occasion.

After Mr. Shirer told him yes, he was taken aback when the boy switched from German to accentless American English. The boy explained that he had been born in Germany but raised from age one until age nine in NYC before his German-born father moved the family to Berlin. His mother was an American-born Irish-Catholic. The boy related that he hated being in the DJs but he and his older brother (then in the Hitler Youth) had no choice. They had been in a Catholic youth organization before the Nazis broke their promise to the pope and had abolished it and the boy and his brother were forced into the Nazi youth organizations.

The boy then related an ugly incident which had occurred a few months previously. He said some of the DJs he had been with had beaten up a Jewish kid badly. The boy said he felt sick about it and tried to stop them to no avail. Afterwards, the boy had been tied to a tree and they hung a sign around his neck reading “Judenfreund!” ("Jew lover!") The boy said he had been left like that for several hours.

Mr. Shirer told the boy how sorry he was to hear this and the boy responded that it was all right and that he had “gotten off easy.” He then asked Mr. Shirer to please tell people in America that they were not all like Hitler and many were forced to act that way. Although Mr. Shirer assured the boy he would not use his name, the boy seemed too terrified to give him his surname. He would only tell him that his first name was Bobbi (Bobby). Mr. Shirer noted that it must have taken great courage for the boy to have even spoken to him after what had happened.

They shook hands and parted never to meet again. Mr. Shirer said the incident had always haunted him, and he always wondered if the boy had survived the war. He said he had looked at the photographs of the Hitler Youth boys whom Hitler had been pinning medals on in the last ditch effort defense of the capital (I think the last known photograph of Hitler) to see if he could recognize Bobbi but was unable to. (At age seventeen or eighteen, he more than likely would have been in the army by then.)

As I said, being a kid myself when I heard this it scared me and made me realize how lucky I was to live in our great democracy!

.

 

Here’s a photograph of a troop of Jungvolk if anyone is interested:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...-151,_Worms,_Fanfarenkorps_des_Jungvolkes.jpg

It was for boys ages 10-14.

 

Also, here is the photo I referred to of Hitler commending Hitler Youth boys in their pathetic last stand in Berlin, April, 1945. I believe it is the last known photo of Hitler, though someone please correct me if I’m wrong there.

http://pavlovsterror.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/PAV_4_-_HITLER_YOUTH.12111607.jpg

 

That's a great story, David. Thank you for sharing it on the forum.

 

For a "Jew lover", I too think that the lad got off easy (fortunately).

Thank you for the story David.


Welcome to the forum.

 

Very scary for a young boy to be forced into such a thing and have to endure having his mind warped. Such a hard thing for me to fathom. I cannot imagine having to live for years like that and having no option to get out or escape. What was the punishment, or was there punishment for kids who escaped or were caught resisting the Hitler Youth teachings?

 

Those who did not join were suspected by neigbourgs. Parents would lose job opportunities and get a lot of pressure

 

After Hitler came to power, all other youth movements such as the Boy Scouts, with the exception of the CYO (Catholic Youth) were abolished and as a result the Hitler Youth grew quickly. In 1936, the figure stood at 4 million members. In 1936, membership ceased being "voluntary" and it became all but compulsory to join the Hitler Youth, and the CYO also disappeared.

Some young people could avoid doing any active service if they paid their HJ and BDM (Bund Deutscher Madel) subscription fees, but this became all but impossible after 1939. Another change in 1939 was that attendance at the HJ meetings also became mandatory, this happened because by 1938, attendance at Hitler Youth meetings was so poor with only 25% of the members showing up that the authorities, led by Balder von Shirach decided to tighten up attendance with the 1939 law making attendance compulsory.

By 1935, about 60 percent of Germany's young people belonged to the Hitler Youth, since most of the other youth groups had disappeared, what young boy doesn't like to march and camp out? Without the Boy Scouts the options were limited, but the HJ and BDM still didn't get them all enrolled, so in December of 1936, "The Hitler Youth Law" made membership compulsory for all youths, male and female, aged 10 to 18. These were obviously gender separated, as well as age separated. Parents who prevented their children from joining the Hitler Youth were subject to heavy fines or even prison sentences. Membership thus grew to nearly six million.

Much of this is taken from the book A Child of Hitler by Alfons Heck, and other sources.

Even with the membership being compulsory after 1936, there were waivers given to some young people even if healthy and non-Jewish, the present Pope and his brother being two. Since they were in the seminary, they were allowed to continue with their studies, and it wasn’t until the future Pope had reached the age of 18 that he was drafted into an Anti-Aircraft detachment, from which he promptly deserted.

 

Good story! And it shows that we can be lucky to live in better times!

 

Thanks for the info Clint!

 

Sorry double post!

 

Thank you for your interest, TD.

Best,

Dave

 

Thank you, Sloniksp.

I tend to agree. I know nothing of this story behind the bare bones account. As humiliating as it must have been for the poor little fellow (I would imagine any adults who saw him that way turned away while some kids probably mocked him or even spat or threw dirt on him), he could have fared far worse. He could have been sent to some sort of “reeducation” institution for wayward youths. I remember feeling shame when I heard this story. Although I knew for a fact that I would have felt exactly as he had concerning the poor Jewish kid, I seriously doubted I would have had this boy’s courage to try to intervene.

I, of course, have no idea why the family had been living in the United States and why they returned to Germany where they had apparently lived for some years after the parents met and married. Maybe the father had caught the Nazi bug (there was much of that in the NYC German immigrant community centered around Yorkville in Manhattan) and answered Der Fuehrer's call for ethnic Germans to return to the Fatherland. After all, even the likes of the Scholl siblings (founders of The White Rose, the student anti-Nazi underground movement in Munich) and von Stauffenberg! were enthusiastic admirers of Hitler until they saw the metaphorical light.

Therefore, the family had probably been extolled as virtuous before this incident and the DJ troop leader had labeled the youth as “misguided” and needed to be taught a simple lesson.

 

That’s exactly right. In Mr. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich he notes how reluctant parents were threatened with losing their jobs and worse for trying to keep their kids out. Some parents didn’t want their children in for reasons that had nothing to do with politics, like their daughters coming back pregnant from their compulsory year of labor on German farms (which often happened).

 

Clint,

Thanks so much for that most informative response. You obviously know more about this subject than do I. I must look for the book you referenced ASAP. Thank you for the mention.

I have one question for you, please. The boy whom Mr. Shirer had briefly encountered in the park had mentioned to him that his mother was American by birth. Assuming the family remained in Germany throughout the war, what would have been her status? Would she have had to renounce her American citizenship (either willingly or reluctantly) to avoid internment in Germany as an enemy alien after the United States entered the war? Would she have been liable for treason charges by the U.S. after the war? I would imagine that she had not been the only non-German spouse living in Germany caught up in that predicament during the war.

Thanks again, Clint.

 

Bryon,

Well, in the movie The Swing Kids, about jazz-loving German youngsters in Hamburg antagonistic towards the Nazis, the lead juvenile character gets sent to a concentration camp. Please see Clint’s response for more about the subject.

By the way, I love your referenced quote from FDR which I had not previously been familiar. Even though I have been a Republican all my voting life, I have always greatly admired him.

Thanks.

Dave

 

This is a bit more complex than Americans in Germany at the time of the war declaration, she wouldn't have been "required" to denounce her American citizenship, I don't think, but as the spouse of a German national she would have been in a very precarious position if she kept it and didn't become a nationalized German citizen. But I don't know what the "rules" would have been for her. America was quite surprised when American citizens who happened to be Jewish were NOT excluded from the anti-Jewish laws of Nazi Germany, but they did little to mitigate their plight.

There were hundreds if not thousands of American Jews who were sent to the KZs for the duration, but I don't really know the numbers or how many survived the war. Unless she actively participated in support of the Nazis, she wouldn't have been open to treason charges to my mind. Remember that Mildred Gilliars (sp?), known as Axis Sally was convicted of treason for her radio broadcasts, but she also impersonated a Red Cross nurse in order to gain intelligence from wounded American soldiers, and that didn't help her cause either. Iva Toguri, Orphan Ann ( mistakenly identified as Tokyo Rose) was also convicted of "treason", but that was done with perjured testimony and her own misunderstanding of what she had been promised by a journalist, not a state department official. Without overt activity on the part of an American citizen in support of an enemy state, a treason charge is rather tough to prosecute.

Here is a link to a site dealing with American citizens at war's outbreak, but these were couples of Americans, not a mixed group, i.e. one German/one American.

Goto:

American Internees

 

Thanks, Ulrich

William L. Shirer was much derided within Germany after the publication of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Not only so by Nazis and their sympathizers, but even by the likes of Konrad Adenauer! Have you read the book? If so, do you have an opinion? Do you think it is unfairly biased?

Thanks much!

Dave

 

I remember that Shirer´s book was one of the books i´ve read with more than 1000 pages and it is a detailed and exciting good readable book with good sources and not a typical onesided in perspective book, like you find them often. To me it isn´t understandable why he was derided. I think it was more a matter of that time than the book itself.

 

When the book came out in 1960, I didn't see a copy until the following year and that was a "paperback" version which was owned by a classmate who was also twelve years old and in the seventh grade with me. I remember reading it then and being fascinated with the "dark Nazi" version of Germany Mr. Shirer put forward. As a then practicing Luthern, I myself was more than a bit upset with his connection between Hitler and Martin Luther, but I even then I understood that anti-Jewish mind-sets were the norm not the exception in Europe, and parts of America as well.

In Germany proper, "the Berlin wall" wasn't yet up, and discourse between East and West was a very warm situation to say the least. And while Konrad Adenauer was a Catholic, he most likely didn't have much love for Luther, and the connection between the Germany of Luther and the Nazi state couldn't have been pleasant.

Just my take of course, since I didn't live in Germany at the time and all totalitarian governments were seen by American kids as "bad things". They were of course, but we really didn't know why at the time I was twelve.